


Broken Spines

by NeverComingHome



Category: Stranger Than Fiction (2006)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-24
Updated: 2015-01-24
Packaged: 2018-03-08 20:55:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3223130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeverComingHome/pseuds/NeverComingHome
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Doomed from the start and downhill from there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Broken Spines

When Karen was in college she met a lawyer who never became a baker. Diana would hold all night study sessions with progressively more delicious snacks (and later full meals) and her notebooks of recipes crowded the free space on the crooked bookshelf Karen made the month before she changed her minor in art to a major in literature. They were taking the same women’s studies course and often would end up shoulder to shoulder in intense conversation about anything from the feminist movement in Ireland to whether or not chocolate did indeed go with everything, sweet or savory be damned. 

“You could open a shop.” Diana laughed. “You could. Imagine, cookies in the shape of tiny biracial fists.”

“Empower-mints.”

“I’d do all your advertising. I’ll change my major.”

“Again?”

“For you, for you and your peace” she held up two fingers, “of cakes…with rainbow frosting.”

“Obviously.”

“You could change the world.”

Diana glanced at her unfinished paper on the nightstand beside Karen. “You can’t change the world with an oven.”

“I know a narcissistic German who would disagree.”

Diana pinched her. “Lovely, simply lovely. You know your peer review partner is my brother’s girlfriend. He said she was up all night crying after your last attempt at an uplifting story.”

Despite herself Karen smiled and earned herself another pinch which quickly dissolved into an exchange of retaliations resulting in apologies and promises of homemade bread to go with the honey butter in the fridge. 

~*~  
Like deja vu Karen sits down with her character and makes excuses. She tells her that Harold is an amalgamation of various kind hearted, but stiff shirted people she’d come across, but Ana wants to know what’s wrong with him, why she’d created him to die. Karen feels like an impostor in God shoes.

“It’s not about punishment.”

“Then why do you do it, huh? Why do you make terrible things happen to good people?”

“People waste themselves, Harold wasted himself until he heard my voice, existing until something happened that made him aware that he was simply existing. Moments are what make us and all of them let themselves be controlled by circumstance and so they died as they lived-without choice.”

“Really? Well, I think you are a sad woman who hides in this stupid, empty apartment because someone in your life didn't do exactly what you expected of them and now you punish all your characters for it.”

It’s true that writers put a bit of themselves into every story and Ana is burdened with knowledge she doesn't care that she has. She stands, wanting to move, but compelled to stay. 

“It was almost you,” Karen tells her, unable to not. A lawyer who never became a baker is audited by a straight laced, good man, so content with his menial job and his lack of ambition that she second guesses herself. She starts to wonder if it’s not her that is broken instead of the world and so she bakes and she learns a lesson and she falls in love a little and then she dies. Only Karen couldn't kill Diana. “You live because you are imperfect.”

Karen gives her the full story, she tells her about their classes together, about the stories she wrote when she was starting out and Diana temporarily putting her ethics on the back burner to be a high paid attorney at a prestigious firm. They spoke occasionally, but she was a natural invite to Karen’s engagement party. After each glass Diana would lean in close and tell Karen to not let her forget she wanted to tell her something. They ended up sitting on the guard rail of a bridge in the rain. Diana kissed the cold shell of Karen’s ear and whispered, “Love” then let go and fell backward over the rail. She didn't die. Perhaps it would've been better (easier) if she had. She’d gotten some bruises, some blood in her mouth and some dirty water in her eyes, then she stopped taking Karen’s calls and eventually Karen stopped making them. 

After her divorce Karen looked her up, but Diana was at another firm, took pictures with energetic dogs licking her scrunched up nose and had clientele who referred to her affectionately and by her first name. She didn't answer her own phone anymore and her secretary told Karen they’d get back to her in a week if she wanted to leave her contact information for Diana’s social calendar.

She wrote Ana to be flawed and loud, someone who would push the object of their affection into the couch cushions and kiss them quiet instead of hold their hand and not say a word.

“People are fucked up, okay? You can’t put together a life like it’s an equation. Every time I pass a bridge I feel like jumping and not because I didn't become a lawyer or my roommate-who was a really talented sculptor by the way-never kissed me, but because when I was ten I wanted to be a pigeon when I grew up. Did you write that?”

“No.”

“No, because it’s insignificant, but if I jumped off a bridge yesterday you’d think it was because Harold and I broke up, but I am not a catalyst or the rising action.” Ana places a hand over her heart and stares at a splotch of flour on her shoe with tears in her eyes. “I’m me.”

“Oh, darling, of course you are.”

Maybe there are no perfect endings in life, or otherwise, because it’s true Karen kisses her and they fall into a relationship as easily as they fall into bed and while they’re together they share meaningful glances over the pillow, but it isn’t really love. They get into an argument about big, unfix-able things and Karen locks herself into the bathroom with her type writer and thinks ‘I can change her’. In the end she doesn't type a word, but it doesn't keep Ana from flipping a pancake so high it nearly touches the ceiling and wondering if she forgave Karen because she wanted to or because she was made to want to.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm toying with the idea of expanding this into a larger story down the road so if you dig it let me know.


End file.
